Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Surekha Davies

Surekha Davies is a British historian of science and the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the Journal of the History of Ideas’ Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. Davies’ writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, Aeon magazine, Reactor magazine and Pasts Imperfect. She writes a free newsletter, Strange and Wondrous: Notes From a Science Historian.

Stories from this author

Hell, unknown artist, circa 1510 to 1520

This Disturbing 16th-Century Painting of Hell Linked Satan and His Demons With the New World Beyond Europe

The panel features monsters with African, Indigenous Caribbean and intersex features, encouraging viewers to connect the sins and punishments depicted to those considered “other”